Aligning Product & Software Design

Abstract of a talk of Sandro Mancuso

Context

Average company

  • Strong boundaries between Technical and Business

  • Technical debt ?

    • Developers

      • "We don't have time to improve our system"

      • "We are struggling with technical debt"

        • Vicious circle

    • Business

      • "We need more features"

How to avoid that ?

  • Problem ?

    • Project mindset

      • Get to that end

      • Great for something with a start and an end

      • Optimize the means to that end

  • Software product

    • Continuous evolution

      • Not a great fit for project

      • Sequence of valuable increment

    • Should look at

      • Not only cost

      • Continuous investment

"There is a tension between the way we manage project and the way we manage product"

  • Product strategy

    • Defined isolated from technology

    • Product backlog created

      • By the business

    • Only there the Dev team is coming in

      • Not part of the product definition

    • So the result = Reactive design

      • Do not have time to architect

      • End by begging for time

        • To refactor for example

  • As developers

    • We must explain the value of designing software

    • Part of the meeting to contribute

      • BUT we don't know exactly HOW

    • We need to have something to add

      • Be able to explain Biz value of design

        • Not only to be able to organize our code

        • Can have a huge role

          • Examples

            • Enable different teams to work in parallel

            • Need to design our code to do so

            • Be able to automate -> for CD purpose

      • Enable the way that we need to work

Different levels of design

  • Enterprise Architecture

    • How your product fits in a larger ecosystem

  • Solutions Architecture

    • Solution of your product

    • How we re gonna do / split

  • Technical Architecture

    • What technology

    • SLA

    • ...

  • Macro Design

    • Components

    • Overall structure

  • Micro Design

    • Classes

    • Functions

    • Methods

When we design ?

"We often struggle to find the time"

Understand Product design

  • Looks a lot like Waterfall

    • Make it iterative

  • Devs involved only in the development

    • Through the product backlog

    • Not able to create the technical strategy

      • Not have time here

1) Ideation

In startup product is part of the company

Build a vision for the product: NOT A PLAN

  • A direction

    • Guiding our work

    • Create a context to offer services

Product Definition

Value Proposition Canvas

  • Shape the scope of our product

  • 1 canvas per customer segmentation

Technical Feasibility

  • Build a technical vision

  • Create a unified view with business & technology

Results

  • Business & technology alignment

  • Shared & more realistic product vision

  • Context for pro-active & supportive tech strategy

2) Strategy

Create a roadmap

  • Use Lean Startup approach

Create an architecture

  • Define the technology stack

  • Refine what has been done in Tech feasibility

  • Design to support the way of the business

Results

  • Common understanding of business & technical strategy

  • Technical architecture created to support the business

  • More realistic & sustainable product roadmap with Biz and tech

  • High level modularisation makes it easier to plan

3) Planning

  • Use the term Minimum Valuable Increment

    • Need to invest in technical things

Impact Mapping

  • Validate the value towards the goal

  • Validate the things we want to build by value

Generate your backlog from the Impact Mapping

Create a plan

  • Achieve Continuous Delivery

  • Several teams working in parallel

  • Discover a lot of unknown

  • Help to reshape our backlog

Results

  • Technical effort, risks & dependencies impact prioritization of MVI's

  • Easier to size MVI's when high level technical details are known

  • Helps to distribute work across teams efficiently

  • Technical solution designed to support Continuous Delivery (goal of Agile)

4) Development

  • Design Apis from your mockup

    • Outside IN

    • What is the outside world expecting from us

Results

  • Test & deployment strategies for each increment

  • Enables CD

  • Detailed design helps to identify risks, dependencies & unknown

  • Enable safe evolution of the code

    • Keeping it maintainable

  • Pro-active & continuous technical improvement aligned with biz value

    • Always improve

  • Prevents accumulation of technical debt

Conclusion

  • Often POs

    • They have

      • No good vision

      • Don't own it

      • Product definition is vague

    • Product roadmap

      • No milestones

      • Create a big plan

      • Rigid product backlog

    • From High level strategy to Product backlog

  • Architects

    • Architecture are created without biz inputs

    • No connection with dev teams

  • Introduce technical milestones to balance the graph

  • Make sure than each phases are done

    • with Biz & technology

    • As a single team

"In a software product, software design should be an explicit part of the business strategy"

The talk

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